“Forms Aren’t Neutral”: Reflections from FormFest 2026

Forms are one of the most common ways people interact with government. A form can be the first step toward getting food assistance, enrolling a child in school, applying for housing, filing taxes, accessing health care, or receiving a benefit. But when a form is confusing, inaccessible, unnecessarily long, or designed around the needs of an agency instead of the person filling it out, that first step can become a barrier.

That’s why we bring people together for FormFest. Hosted by Code for America and the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, FormFest 2026 brought together government practitioners, designers, technologists, researchers, advocates, and people with lived experience to explore a deceptively simple question: How can we make government forms work better for everyone?

The answer, as we heard throughout the event, isn’t simply to make forms look better. It’s to rethink what forms are for, and what they can become when we invest the time and energy needed to improve them.

“Improving a form isn’t simply a writing or design exercise,” said Lynn Overmann, Executive Director of the Beeck Center during our opening mainstage discussion. “It means understanding the entire service.” 

That sentiment was echoed in all of our sessions, no matter the subject matter—from New Jersey’s work with doulas to co-design a new provider registration tool, to Santa Clara County’s process for modernizing their application portfolio to make it more accessible.

The form reform movement proved it was gaining steam this year, with a record 2,400 FormFest registrants. We welcomed form fanatics from 25 countries and 47 states, plus Washington DC and Puerto Rico. Globally, 63% of our registrants were from government, with nearly half (49%) of those from state government, followed by 22% municipal, 12% county, and 11% federal. Together, we got to hear from 50 speakers representing 25 government agencies and civic tech organizations over an afternoon packed with 17 sessions. 

We heard repeatedly about how powerful a well-designed form can be for improving user experience—and therefore how much power we, as form designers, have in shaping someone’s interaction with government. In a session about how Philadelphia redesigned their water utility assistance application, Ciara Ali Khan, Lead Service Designer for the City of Philadelphia Service Design Studio reminded us of how important even small decisions in form design can be. “Forms are not neutral,” Khan said. “Forms reflect the systems that create them. They carry all kinds of legitimate needs, program and legal requirements, fraud prevention measures, operational and data collection needs, and maybe just decisions that have accumulated over many years, even if they're no longer relevant to the process…For us, the redesign was an opportunity to work through those competing needs together, continually coming back to our criteria of making the experience simpler, more accessible, actionable, trauma-informed, and responsive for residents.” 

Small changes can make a big difference

FormFest reinforced an important idea: improving government doesn’t always require starting from scratch. 

Sometimes the biggest improvements come from relatively small changes. Plain language can replace bureaucratic terminology. A complicated question can become two simple ones. Instructions can appear exactly when they are needed instead of several pages earlier. Unnecessary questions can be removed. Error messages can explain how to fix a problem instead of simply announcing that something went wrong.

These changes may seem modest individually. But at the scale of government, they can add up.

“The form is never just paperwork,” said Sara Hall, Executive Director of CODE PA. “It's a stand-in for a conversation you're not in the room for. … If you design with that in mind, you're not just making a nicer form, but a more understandable form and you're giving people back their time.” 

The technology is changing. The principles aren’t.

Technology was another important part of the conversation at FormFest. Digital forms, conversational interfaces, and AI are creating new possibilities for how people provide information to government. Even while we try new things, the same principles continue to matter: start with people, understand the problem, test with real users, make information clear, build for accessibility, protect privacy, and continuously improve based on evidence.

Those principles showed up in all our AI conversations. Lucy Burns, a Product Manager with San Francisco’s Digital Services team explained how they’re using AI to quickly test new ideas to see if they’re feasible. “AI makes prototypes really quick and easy—it's such a great way to validate whether something is even needed,” she said in their session about empowering staff to build better digital forms. “Discovering that your tool isn't the thing is still a win, so [you know] you don't have to over-invest in that.”

From FormFest to what comes next

Perhaps the most encouraging part of FormFest was seeing how many people are already doing this work. Across agencies and organizations, people are finding ways to remove unnecessary steps, simplify complicated processes, improve accessibility, and build services around the realities of people’s lives.

The event may be over, but the work is just beginning. There are still millions of forms being filled out every day—that’s countless opportunities to make government a little easier to navigate, one form at a time.